White Rural Educational Research: The Possibilities of Multiplicity

• In Event: (Re)Placing Rural Education: Unpacking Place at the Intersections of Rural and Indigenous Education

Abstract

Rural educational research is a white, monocultural space. Take for example research published in the Journal of Research in Rural Education. Aside from an upcoming special issue dedicated to Black Lives Matter in Rural Schools, a quick review suggests that both study participants and authors of JRRE publications are overwhelmingly white. If JRRE can stand as a proxy for scholarly publication in rural education, significant barriers exist for the publication of Indigenous-authored rural scholarship, the publication of research with Indigenous schools, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous rural collaborations such as what could come out of this working group round table. As Tanner (2019) states, “Whiteness is a white problem” (pp. 182), likewise, the fact that rural educational research is white is a white problem.

Rural education as a subfield has been organized around the repetition of the message that rural schools and communities are places distinct from more urban places (Biddle et al., 2019; White & Corbett, 2014). Within the development of rural education as a legitimate subfield, rural and urban are often thinly conceptualized (Sipple et al, in press) as dichotomous places, rather than connected, fluid, and in conversation (Corbett, 2014; Corbett, 2020; Williams, 1974). Within this dichotomy the people who make urban and rural places are also separate and, to some extent, both groups are racialized black and white caricatures. While rural scholars, myself included, are quick to point to existing research that challenges homogeneous thinking about rural places as white places and to make calls for “multiplicity” (Pini et al., 2017, pg. 324), neither action results in published educational research that is representative of rural people and places. Pini and colleagues (2017) state, “There is clearly a considerable chasm to overcome to merge the multiplicity of rural living with how rural living is conceptualised and constructed” (pg. 324). Because it’s true that whiteness in rural educational research is a white problem and an outcome of systemic racism, it’s also true that (white) educational research needs to change in order to make literal and figurative space for Indigenous scholarship in rural education. Doing so would require the active inclusion of Indigenous scholars as authors and co-authors, more explicitly collaborative efforts such as this roundtable, and actively pushing back on scholarship in which the complexities of race are made invisible.

Author

• Karen Eppley, Pennsylvania State University